Ferlinghetti to publish his travel journals

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his art studio in San Francisco in 2012. (Photo by Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle)

There’s no letting up for Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The dean of San Francisco booksellers, who co-founded City Lights Bookstore in 1953 and helped launch the Beat movement, published a book of poetry, “Time of Useful Consciousness,” in 2012. When he’s not at City Lights, Ferlinghetti is at work on his paintings at his art studio in Hunters Point.

And the now this quintessential Renaissance man — who turns 95 on March 24 — will publish his travel journals.

“Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013)” will be published by Liveright in September 2015. Sterling Lord, who represents Jack Kerouac’s estate, sold the book to Robert Weil, editor in chief of Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton & Co.

“Writing Across the Landscape,” Liveright said in a statement, “will bring together a vast store of primarily unpublished, handwritten travel journals and notebooks, as well as out-of-print and hard-to-find published works,” including “The Mexican Night” (1970) and “Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre” (1984).

Ferlinghetti, who was born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1919, served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II. Liveright said the book begins with his time on a Navy sub chaser in the Normandy Invasion in World War II. It also covers his time as a doctoral student at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied comparative literature, and chronicles his journeys in Mexico, Haiti, North Africa, Cuba, Spain, the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Italy, where his father was born.

The journals, said Liveright, will “offer a fuller portrayal of Ferlinghetti that goes beyond more fleeting associations with the Beats, revealing a more intimate personal side and a deeper view of Ferlinghetti’s political engagement at significant moments in 20th century history. Many of these trips — to Cuba in 1960, Nicaragua in 1984, and Russia in 1968, for example — show a sharp concern for the political climate of the places he visits.”

The book will also include original artwork and facsimiles of Ferlinghetti’s notebooks.